Finding Your Research Personality

I love a good Wes Anderson movie.

His humor is whimsical and slightly dark, his cinematography is vivid and fantastical, and his stories are a mess of intersecting character arcs and random tangents that somehow coalesce into a plot.

While watching Anderson's latest offering, The Grand Budapest Hotel, I mused on the mess of intersecting pursuits that frequently seem to characterize my life as a graduate student (with the hope that they will coalesce into a plot nearly as good as Anderson's).

This week has been a jumble of different undertakings: my co-organizers and I ran a biannual mixer and discussion forum for the Princeton Women in Geosciences Initiative; I went to a seminar on writing and reviewing academic papers; I helped an undergraduate with his senior thesis; I learned about China's energy development pathways. And sandwiched between all of these things, I tried to portion out my work time between my current dissertation research, revising my previous dissertation work, my policy project, and another project with some collaborators.

None of these things have immediate deadlines and each could easily occupy all of my mental space if I let it, but I had to figure out how to focus on one thing at a time and in what order (to be honest, it's an ongoing process).

Choosing how to spend my time has been one of the great challenges of doing something as unstructured as getting a PhD. After our general exam, we're essentially sent off into the blue to weave ourselves into fully functional academics. Deciding what it means to be an academic and what kind of academic I want to become has been an intellectual and existential struggle. My friend refers to it as "finding your research personality."

There are many different approaches to being a scientist. Do you value skepticism above all else and advance the field by scrutinizing other peoples' work for improvements? Or do you value collaboration? Will your great contribution come from digging deeply into understanding one phenomenon, or will it come from asking the hypothetical questions that get everyone thinking in a new way? Do you write your papers from beginning to end, or do you write the results first and then go from the middle out? Everyone has a different philosophy, and your philosophy may end up being very different from your advisor's or your institution's or even, ultimately, academia's.

I often struggle with corralling my wide-ranging interests into the standard metric of what constitutes a good academic, namely research productivity as quantified by number of papers published. I enjoy thinking deeply about climate science, but I also want to spend time doing things like organizing scientific dinner discussions for undergrads, or learning how to teach effectively, or running women in science organizations, or taking classes on policy and economics so that I can communicate outside of scientific circles. But what do I do if the things that I value don't align with the things that an academic job search values?

There's a thread on the online Earth Science Women's Network in which one scientist details how having founded a nonprofit organization to give high school girls experience in field research has worked against her in academic job interviews. Earlier this year, two public health professors at Columbia were fired for dedicating too much time to public engagement and not enough to securing grant funding.

Does the evaluating rubric of the academic community need to change to accommodate these different aspects of what makes someone a good contributor to the advancement of science in society? In some ways it is already starting to, with big funding agencies like the National Science Foundation demanding to see a robust explanation of the "Broader Impacts" of any scientific project proposal that crosses its desk looking for money. But this push has been met with no small amount of hesitancy within the scientific community. Do I instead need to change my expectations of what career path will make the best use of my skills and passions?

In one of the discussion forums at the PWiGS mixer this week, I voiced a guiding principle for myself that I'd never articulated or even fully thought through before then: I'm going to choose what to dedicate my time to according to my own internal value system, because in the end those are the only values that I will be able to defend. Whatever career path those pursuits lead me down will then be an honest representation of what I think is important.

Another student in the discussion encouraged me with a word of wisdom from none other than Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Dumbledore gives this gem of tough love to the Hogwarts groundkeeper, Hagrid, who has shut himself in his cabin during a particularly crippling bout of low self-esteem:

"Really, Hagrid, if you're holding out for universal popularity, I'm afraid you're going to be in this cabin a very long time."

Though I don't think the fictional wizard ever pursued a PhD himself, the quote was a reminder that the process of forging one's own research personality sometimes requires forgoing universal popularity.

My drama teacher used to repeat Walt Whitman's poem, To a Pupil, to each of his graduating students, and one stanza in particular has always stuck with me. In this process of finding my research personality, it is perhaps the call to action that I find most compelling.

Go, dear friend, if need be give up all else, and commence to-day
       to inure yourself to pluck, reality, self-esteem, definiteness,
       elevatedness.
Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself of your own Personality.

The Ethics of Air

Of all the breaths that I've taken in my life, my favorites are those first gulps of fresh air when I step out of the airport at a destination. It's my first chance to breathe in the character of a new location or to inhale a favorite harbor's je ne sais quoi.

Even now, when I return to my hometown, that first taste of Texas air is like an elixir--warm, slightly humid, and profoundly comforting. In my family's home country of Trinidad and Tobago, stepping out of the Port of Spain airport brings with it a waft of diesel exhaust, sweat, and maybe a little hint of curry from the doubles stand--spicy, alive, and familiar.

I take those waves of sensory nostalgia for granted. This week, though, I came across this article in the San Francisco Chronicle that's been making the rounds on Facebook and that gave me a much overdue admonition on the importance of air.

The article highlights a recent piece of work from a Chinese artist, Liang Kegang, that consists of a sealed mason jar of French Alpine air, sold to the highest bidder for $860 in protest of China's poor air quality. The article also details a few somewhat less symbolic endeavors deriving from China's recent battles with air pollution, including one clearer-aired province's plan to sell canned air for visitors to take home with them and a Chinese entrepreneur who is already doing so.

The issue, though covered in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way, is a bit disturbing to me. It seems fundamentally unsettling for something like clean air to be commodified (which, perhaps, was Liang's intended point). Is it problematic for clean air to be something that can be bought and sold, something to which some have access and others don't?

I suppose in some ways we already allow clean air to be bought and sold. Some people can afford to move out of areas with urban smog, while others can't. On the other hand, at least in the U.S., universal access to clean water is something that has been made a priority. Municipal tap water is safe to drink and you can get it for free at a restaurant or from a public water fountain. Why is the same universal access not applied to clean air?

All of this contemplation happens to overlap with some in-depth reading I've been doing of a recent paper that does a neat analysis of the amount of emissions of different air pollutants in China that come from exports to other countries.

The most striking result of the paper for me is summed up pretty neatly in the below figure.

The percent change in the surface concentration of the air pollutant, black carbon, due to goods being manufactured in China and exported to the U.S. from Lin et al. (2014).

The figure shows the change in one type of air pollutant, black carbon, (which also happens to be the air pollutant that my research is focused on) due to goods being manufactured in China and exported to the U.S. rather than being manufactured in the U.S.

There are a few interesting things going on in the figure. You can see that the U.S. has had less air pollution because of this trade, but that China has had more--in fact, way more than the U.S. has had less. This has to do with the "emissions intensity" of China's manufacturing--basically, much more pollution is emitted when one widget is produced in China than when that same widget is produced in the U.S. (because of difference in manufacturing practices, energy sources, etc.).

The amount of pollution in China due to exports to the U.S. is not a small amount, especially when you add in all the other types of pollutants besides black carbon. All together, more than 20% of all export-related pollution (which makes up 15-40% of all air pollution in China, depending on the type of pollutant) is due to China-to-U.S. exports.

This result takes on extra meaning in the context of that $860 jar of air. If a jam jar of fresh air costs $860, how much do we owe China? How much more would we have to pay for things imported from China if the cost of clean air were included in the price of the goods?

Even more thought-provoking to me are the studies looking at mortality due to air pollution. One such study from some Princeton authors shows that more than 700,000 deaths in East Asia in the year 2000 could be attributed to particulate air pollution. It would be fairly easy to use the same formulas to attribute some portion of those deaths to air pollution that comes from exports.

The debate over who is truly responsible for such deaths is ongoing. Is it China for not implementing better pollution reduction measures? Or is it the importing country for driving the need for production in the first place? But it regardless raises some important questions about the global commons that is our atmosphere.

We have an odd relationship with the air we breathe. We so frequently are completely oblivious to it, but every now and then, like when stepping out of those airport sliding doors, it reminds us of its centrality in our lives. 

Can we put a price on that?

All the Rights and Responsibilities

The sun is shining (today, at least), it's finally above 40 degrees, and it's general exam season for the 2nd years.

The general exam is the first intellectual hurdle of the PhD. In our department, it's a two-part challenge: an oral exam during which you present the results of your first two years of research and field questions from the faculty, and a two day written exam during which you are tested over the breadth of coursework that you've completed to date.

The exam is dispersed across the last few months of our 2nd year Spring semester and determines whether we can advance from the Master's stage of our graduate work to the PhD stage. Those who fail can choose to attempt to retake the exam or to leave with a Master's degree. Our 2nd years are brilliant, and I'm sure will trounce the exam with flying colors, but it's still useful during the high stress to have a reminder of why we started down this path to begin with.

For me and others in my department, we came into this field because somewhere in our previous education the science of climate change entered our consciousness, and we found it fascinating, compelling, and unsettling.

Although my general exams are a year in the rearview mirror, this year's exam season has coincided with a period of heightened stress for me as well, with journal reviews, annual reports, and project meetings coalescing into a haze of take-out Thai food and late nights in front of the computer.

Which is why I was particularly grateful (in a bittersweet way) for the jolt of motivation that came in the form of the release of Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, the second phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's  Fifth Assessment Report. This phase is one of three sections of the IPCC's latest report on the scientific basis of climate change, it's impacts, and possible approaches to addressing it. For a brief, clear overview of the report and its contents (complete with compelling infographics on the geographical distribution of climate change impacts), you can check out the Environmental Defense Fund's summary.

The release of the report has sparked a flurry of media coverage of the impacts of climate change, including an interview on NPR's Radio Times with Princeton's Michael Oppenheimer and Rutgers' Benjamin Horton and this feature on PBS' Charlie Rose with Oppenheimer, Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs, and Penn State's Michael Mann:
Around 13:10 in the Charlie Rose feature, Dr. Sachs says:
"We need to hear more solutions...Fear can open the eyes for at least a moment, but it can also get people to tune down or even tune out sometimes...I'd like to see some clear leadership about the things to do, because actually, there are a lot of specific things that would make a huge difference."
(if the embedded video doesn't show up in your browser, you can view it here)

His statement took me back to a meeting I had in the greenest days of my PhD career, when I was still touring universities to meet with potential PhD advisors in the different programs I had applied to.

On one visit, I sat down with Dr. Veerabhandran Ramanthan in his office overlooking the Pacific Ocean outside of San Diego. He's been part of a major push to distribute cleaner burning cookstoves in rural parts of South Asia to reduce black carbon aerosol emissions, which pose a huge health and climate risk. During our meeting, Dr. Ramanathan said something similar, but not identical, to Jeffrey Sach's statement--that climate scientists have done enough to delineate what is a rather disturbing global problem, and it's time now to start offering solutions.

What struck me about that mental juxtaposition was that Jeffrey Sachs' call for solutions was focused at policymakers and at the technology and energy sectors, not at climate scientists like Dr. Ramanathan. Jeffrey Sachs is a world-renowned economists and Michael Oppenheimer has more than two decades of experience in the science policy arena. They are well-qualified to grapple with the economic and political conundrum of addressing climate change, but not all climate scientists are.

Should climate scientists be responsible for offering the solutions to climate change as well as the science? On one hand, climate scientists are best equipped to determine if a solution is actually a solution from a climate standpoint. On the other hand, they are not best equipped to determine if a solution is most economically efficient or ethically just. On the third hand, as Sach's pointed out, though, presenting the often bleak realities of climate change without the prospect of constructive pathways out of the problem is a recipe for people to tune out of the science as well.

I could easily develop a veritable octopus of back and forth opinions on this. My undergraduate diploma conveyed my degree "with all the Rights and Responsibilities thereunto appertaining." Wouldn't it be nice it they gave us a list of what those rights and responsibilities were?

Until then, I can rest assured that my responsibilities at least lie with this take-out Thai food and another late night in front of the computer.